


Only Call Me Thine

by Poetry



Series: Who Are We? [2]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Angst, Community: wintercompanion, Jack Harkness Backstory, M/M, Time Agency, Timey-Wimey, Virtual Reality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-01
Updated: 2014-08-01
Packaged: 2018-02-11 08:48:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2061681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poetry/pseuds/Poetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor accesses a virtual copy of Jack Harkness saved during his Time Agency days to ask him what happened during the missing two years. But will this younger, more frightened Jack open himself up to a stranger?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Only Call Me Thine

**Author's Note:**

> Written for wintercompanion to the prompt "Rania Anit / in the Factorum / with a stylus / in a hovercraft."
> 
> Ah! replied my gentle fair,  
> Beloved, what are names but air?  
> Choose thou whatever suits the line:  
> Call me Sappho, call me Chloris,  
> Call me Lalage, or Doris,  
> Only, only, call me thine.  
> – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Rania Anit feels his breath stutter from his lungs, the smell of death searing the back of his throat, as he’s wrestled to the floor of the hovercraft and a rough hand presses a sedative patch to the inside of his wrist.  
  
His breath floods back into him, and he’s lying facedown on a chaise longue in a sultry garden, the scent of a hundred flowers pressing down on him. Rania is in the Factorum, he knows right away by the weight of the braids on his back. Knowing it’s virtual reality makes it easy to change his avatar, and his hair reconfigures from Boeshane braids to a loose bun at the nape of his neck, simple and unpolitical. Best to change the wetsuit and oilskin jacket to a tunic, too, just to be safe. Amazing that the self-image the Factorum finds in his head to generate his avatar is still so Boeshane after all these years.  
  
Rania gets pinged as soon as he’s got himself pulled together. Right, he was generated here for a reason. The higher-ups in the Time Agency caught up to him, finally. Maybe his body was still under and they wanted to get started with interrogation right away. In the Factorum, they could do anything, things that weren’t even possible in real life, but would feel real enough to him.    
  
He stands up. He has to act now. There are safe places in the Factorum, hidden behind firewalls and chains of proxy servers. The Time Agency has a long arm, but it can’t reach –  
  
There’s a man in the garden. The one who pinged his ID. He’s tall, spiky-haired, dressed in layers of old-fashioned clothing, his handsome face unfamiliar. But it doesn’t matter. It’s possible to look like anyone in the Factorum if you can bend your mind in the right way to manipulate the virtual reality. Rania reaches into the pocket of his tunic, where he has some disruptive code snippets laid by for emergencies. But first, he needs to know what they have on him.  
  
“You could have waited until I came to, you know,” he says mockingly. “Just couldn’t wait to get your hot virtual hands on me, could you?”  
  
The handsome avatar freezes. He looks stricken. “I’m not Time Agency.”  
  
Rania smirks. “All right, then. Who’s this dashing stranger who just so happens to ping me right as I’m generated in the Factorum after that exciting little hovercraft chase?”  
  
The stranger flinches a little, then his face sets into grim lines. “Who says this is right after? You’re a virtual copy from Rania Anit’s brain right after the Time Agents caught you. But you could be generated here years later.”  
  
Rania suppresses a shiver. He closes his eyes and pings a server to ask for the date. The answer flashes in green digits: 32 Fifth Cycle, 5102. What happened to him on the hovercraft a few minutes ago to him was fifty years ago to the rest of the universe.  
  
He pings the public records for any mention of Agent Rania Anit, and gets an error. There are no records of an Agent Anit because there is no Time Agency. It’s gone, along with all traces of the identity he made for himself when he signed up for it.  
  
He opens his eyes, and says hoarsely, “Who are you? Why did you generate me?”  
  
“I’m the Doctor.” His voice is very soft. “And I’m someone you can trust.”  
  
“Bullshit.” Rania hasn’t trusted anyone since he left the Boe. No one’s given him any reason to.  
  
The Doctor waves his hand and generates a privacy stylus from the air. Rania is impressed. It takes a certain kind of mind to generate such a complex code construct in a matter of seconds. Anything he writes will be completely private, visible to their eyes alone. He holds it delicately in his right hand and writes in the air, glowing green strokes in the achingly familiar script of Rania’s home system:  
  
CALEM JUSKAHAUNET  
  
He hasn’t seen his birth name written down since the day he left the Boe. He gave a false name to the military recruiters. No one is alive (except Gray, oh how he hopes) who knows the name his clan gave him. But against all sense, the Doctor does.  
  
He doesn’t know how the Doctor could know this. Is he from the Boe too? Does he know Gray? “What do you want?”  
  
“Tell me what you did for the last two years,” the Doctor says. There’s a weight to his voice – urgency, concern, and something softer that Rania might dare to call tenderness. “There’s no record left of those years except you, and – I need to know what happened.”  
  
Rania’s blood runs cold. “Am I dead? Did you generate me to help me write my own eulogy?”  
  
“No,” says the Doctor, a smile warming his tone. “No, Calem. You’re not dead.”  
  
“Don’t say that out loud,” Rania hisses.  
  
“Sorry.” The Doctor’s hands twitch in his direction, like he means to give Rania a comforting touch, but he keeps them by his sides. “The Time Agency didn’t kill you. They took away the last two years of your memory.” The hard edge to his eyes softens. “In your future, when I know you, you still don’t remember. I know what it’s like to lose memories that are important to you. You deserve better than that.”  
  
Rania tries to imagine this future self who the Doctor so clearly respects. Older, free from the Time Agency, free to trust this beautiful man with the secret of his name. “They kill the refugees. Tell him that.”  
  
“What?” The Doctor’s voice is soft again, but not like before. More like how a predator’s footfall is soft.  
  
“I wondered for a long time about what happens to the temporal refugees. People who get stranded in another time, one way or another. It’s not simple. They can wreak havoc to the timelines if you don’t rescue them, but you can’t just put them back in their own time either. They know too much. They could change things in ways no one really understands. Then, two years ago, they assigned me to round-up duty, finding and collecting temporal refugees. I didn’t know what they were doing with them after I brought them in, at first.”  
  
Rania remembers the moment when he saw the young cub he rescued pulled from its parents’ breasts, the flash of light that incinerated them. He still doesn’t know what happened to the cub. “But I did some digging and found out. And…” He looks up at the Doctor. His face is so full of pain and righteous anger that for the first time, Rania feels profoundly ashamed. “I didn’t do anything about it. Whatever your friend is like, I’m not him. I didn’t know what the right answer was. I still don’t. We can’t just let the refugees run loose. I’d like there to be a better way, but I just don’t know…”  
  
The Doctor isn’t angry at him. That’s what makes it so difficult. He looks sad, even pitying, and disappointed. “Why did your superiors come after you?”  
  
“They were so young,” Rania says hoarsely. “Just out of their cocoons. Their wings were still wet. They wouldn’t remember anything from the other time, nothing that would disturb the timeline, if I could just bring them home.” He shrugs, a twitch of his shoulders. “My bosses disagree.”  
  
“Oh, Jack – Rania. I’m so sorry.” Some part of Rania screams that the Doctor can’t possibly mean it. It’s a play, a con. The Time Agency isn’t really dead, and this is just another way they’ll screw him over. But the truth of his name shines green in the lush garden air, and cannot be denied. “I can try to find them, if they were in Time Agency custody.”  
  
“They were killed right in front of me,” Rania says. “Shot down from a hovercraft. The timeline’s already fixed.”  
  
“You were very brave to try,” the Doctor says. “The first time you’re brave is always the hardest.”  
  
Rania wants to say he’s been brave before. He fought in a war, after all. But he’d signed up to fight out of desperation, because he thought it was the only way he might find Gray again. The Doctor is right. It was his first time, and he isn’t sure he can do it again. But he must do it again, or else this man wouldn’t believe in his Jack as much as he does.  
  
He doesn’t know what’s showing in his face, but it must be something, because the Doctor reaches out to touch him again, and pauses with his hand halfway toward Rania’s neck. “May I?”  
  
Rania almost says no, because that look in the Doctor’s eyes is almost too much to bear. But he also craves it with a wild thirst he doesn’t quite understand. He nods. The Doctor’s hand is cool and firm on the side of his neck, and his pulse leaps against it. The Doctor comes close enough that he can feel puffs of breath on his lips. Brown eyes study every detail of his face. Rania feels devoured. and he hasn’t even been kissed yet.  
  
To hells with that. Rania closes the gap and crushes his mouth to the Doctor’s, delighting in the heat and pressure of it. He feels a swipe of tongue, and he opens his mouth to it, raising his own hand to grip the side of the Doctor’s head. The Doctor is intense, and yet so gentle.  
  
“You love him,” Rania murmurs into the Doctor’s mouth. “Your Jack.”  
  
“You,” the Doctor returns. “You _are_ him, and there isn’t a single part of him I don’t…” He presses a line of fierce kisses to Rania’s jaw. “You, you, you. So much of you I never knew.”  
  
“He… I won’t remember this,” Rania says, between little gasps of pleasure.  
  
“It’s like dying. Once I deactivate from the Factorum. I won’t know that…” _Someone loves me_ , he wants to finish.  
  
“No,” says the Doctor. “But I’ll tell you everything. Later.”  
  
Rania pulls away with a pang of regret. “Not soon enough.”  
  
“You have to, though. There’s no place for who you are now, in this time. And living in the Factorum isn’t really living at all.”  
  
“I know.” Rania squeezes the Doctor’s shoulders. “I can’t wait to meet you.”  
  
The last thing he sees as he deactivates his avatar is the green glow of his name reflected in the Doctor’s eyes.


End file.
